Thread👇 Since I've seen the topic of LINK token releases come up often, I wanted to a short thread to clear up some misconceptions around them. 1) Token unlocks are *NOT* the same thing as token sales. 70M LINK is released to the team per year regardless if they’re actually sold or not. In fact, if you look at the supply of LINK on exchanges ( it's closing in on a 3 year low, despite the total number of token unlocks we've had being at an all time high (because that's a cumulative number) It's actually at the lowest level as far back as this tracking tool even goes, but I don't want to overstate it if we can't see it. 2) Unlike other projects, LINK token releases don’t just fund the team, but also fund staking rewards and node oracle rewards, and other forms of network incentives. Because Chainlink is not a blockchain, it doesn't have programmatic block rewards by which to distribute inflation. Furthermore, because Chainlink is comprised of hundreds of oracle networks, it cannot have a "one size fits all" block reward because different networks have wildly varying costs due to chain gas cost and node count. Therefore, the manual token unlocks allow Chainlink Labs to use a scalpel to distribute rewards in a fine-tuned way to not overpay for node operations. 3) There is **NO** negative correlation between price and token release. Price has actually gone up after token releases historically + the period of time when LINK perfomed the worst, there was zero token releases happening. You will see my Lookonchain tweet in my thread with evidence: "Before this, Chainlink had unlocked 10 times in total, and 9 of them saw price increases 30 days after unlocking." 4) LINK is capped at 1B max supply, so token releases are finite and have an end date (with lowering inflation each year), whereas reserve buybacks will only grow in size tied to network adoption and will continue far beyond when token releases end.